On Watson-Crick automata

Abstract

Motivated by Watson-Crick automata, we introduce here a grammar counterpart called a Watson-Crick regular grammar that has rules as in a regular grammar but involves double stranded strings. The language generated by this grammar consists of strings in the upper strands of the double stranded strings related by a complementarity relation. We obtain some properties of these grammars and also indicate an application to generation of chain code pictures.